Giving Thanks For Web-Read Things

Had Nidal Malik Hasan been launched from a remotely-piloted Predator drone
into a Pakistani funeral procession, it would have been a bold victory in the
War on Terror; had the major been dropped onto a village in Waziristan or
fired into an Afghan wedding party, it would have represented an efficient
and effective display of tactical military superiority; had he exploded in a
shower of cluster bomblets over a Gaza refugee camp or been dispersed in a
cloud of corrosive gas through an Iraqi city, we could all celebrate this
triumph of American technical ingenuity over the forces of barbarism.
Instead, Major Hasan will be tragically remembered as a piece of prematurely
detonated ordnance, accidentally claiming the lives of people rather than
those of numbers.

I’m also thankful for The Joy of Curmudgeonry,
who brings us an interesting corrective to human presumptions in drawing up
ethical systems, in the form of Thomas Carlyle’s
Schwein’sche Weltansicht.

Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the
comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God service, when it is
violating all His laws. Our passions, ambition, avarice, love, resentment,
etc., possess so
much metaphysical subtlety, and so much overpowering eloquence, that they
insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience, and convert
both to their party…

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